2022 in Review: Contemporary Novels
It’s hard to believe 2022 is almost a thing of the past. It truly feels like only a few months have passed since January, but maybe I should attribute that to what I call the COVID time-warp that is the last 2-3 years.
Despite quickly approaching the horizon, it’s been a great year. As of today, I’ve read 112 books (my goal for the year was 105) and maintained a 594 day streak on Duolingo. I’ve grown comfortable making buttermilk biscuits and pie crusts with little to no advance warning, something that seemed impossible a year ago. (Don’t ask me about the 2021 Thanksgiving pies. I plead the fifth.) I earned a few professional certifications and enrolled in a second bachelor’s degree program. I had a story shortlisted in a writing contest. I became a confirmed member of the Episcopal Church, developed a taste for honeyed mead, and crossed over the 200,000 milestone in my 2012 Prius V. I celebrated 32 years of life, 11 years of love, 9 years of marriage, 5 years of parenthood, and my daughters’ 3rd and 5th birthdays. I beat my personal best on Dr. Mario.
So, to celebrate the imminent passing of this year and start out the way I intend to go (namely, make writing an actual habit and not something I do every once in a while), I’ve decided to do a blog series on my favorite reads of 2022. Once I’ve gone through the genres, I plan to do a tournament-style wrap up and choose my favorite book of the year! I’ve broken these down by genre from most read to least, courtesy of the amazing stats features available on TheStorygraph. First up: Contemporary.
Contemporary is one of those genres that seems unnecessarily vague and nebulous. What does it mean, exactly? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s a catch-all for realistic fiction set in or around our present day reality. I’ve read 30 of these this year so far, and it was hard to narrow these down and find only 5 to talk about today. Most of these are 2021 or 2022 releases, but a few older ones did sneak in as I caught up on that backlogged TBR.
I’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts on these titles, if you’ve read them, or your own favorite contemporary reads from 2022.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Book Club Energy | Artistic | For Nerds | Friendship | Start Up Lore
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. They borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo: a game where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevins Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, games as artform, technology and the human experience, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Family | Identity | Siblings | Ficción Puertorriqueña | Immigrants Get the Job Done
It’s 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan’s powerbrokers.
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can’t seem to find her own…until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets…
Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.
Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico’s history, Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream - all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.
Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian
Friendship | Immigrants Get the Job Done | Desi Fic | Magical Realism
Spanning two continents, two coasts, and four epochs, Gold Diggers expertly balances social satire and magical realism in a classic striver story that skewers the model minority narrative, asking what a community must do to achieve the American dream. In razor sharp and deeply funny prose, Sathian perfectly captures what it is to grow up as a member of a family, of a diaspora, and of the American meritocracy. This blockbuster novel both entertains and levels a critique of what Americans of color must do to make their way.
A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is authentic, funny, and smart. He just doesn't share the same drive as everyone around him.
His perfect older sister is headed to Duke. His parents' expectations for him are just as high. He tries to want this version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.
But Anita has a secret: she and her mother Anjali have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that harnesses the ambition of the jewelry's original owner. Anjali's own mother in Bombay didn't waste the precious potion on her daughter, favoring her sons instead. Anita, on the other hand, just needs a little boost to get into Harvard. But when Neil - who needs a whole lot more - joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart.
Ten years later, Neil is an oft-stoned Berkeley history grad student studying the California gold rush. His high school cohort has migrated to Silicon Valley, where he reunites with Anita and resurrects their old habit of gold theft - only now, the stakes are higher. Anita's mother is in trouble, and only gold can save her. Anita and Neil must pull off one last heist.
Gold Diggers is a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation in to questions of identity and coming of age - that tears down American shibboleths.
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Artsy | Heist | Identity | Immigrants Get the Job Done | Stick it to the Man
A cinematic, entertaining and fast-paced debut novel that is part-Ocean’s Eleven, part-The Social Network and part-Crazy Rich Asians, Portrait of a Thief is an addictive mix of heist and unlikely friendships by way of the politics of colonization.
This was how things began: Boston on the cusp of fall, the Sackler Museum robbed of 23 pieces of priceless Chinese art. Even in this back room, dust catching the slant of golden, late-afternoon light, Will could hear the sirens. They sounded like a promise.
Will Chen, a Chinese American art history student at Harvard, has spent most of his life learning about the West - its art, its culture, all that it has taken and called its own. He believes art belongs with its creators, so when a Chinese corporation offers him a (highly illegal) chance to reclaim five priceless sculptures, it's surprisingly easy to say yes.
Will's crew, fellow students chosen out of his boundless optimism for their skills and loyalty, aren't exactly experienced criminals. Irene is a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything; Daneil is pre-med with steady hands and dreams of being a surgeon. Lily is an engineering student who races cars in her spare time; and Will is relying on Alex, an MIT dropout turned software engineer, to hack her way in and out of each museum they must rob.
Each student has their own complicated relationship with China and the identities they've cultivated as Chinese Americans, but one thing soon becomes certain: they won't say no.
Because if they succeed? They earn an unfathomable ten million each, and a chance to make history. If they fail, they lose everything . . . and the West wins again.
The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
Women’s Fiction | A Little Love | A Lot of Dead People | Women With Interesting Jobs | Returning to a Small Hometown
Ghost meets The Bold Type in this sparkling adult debut about a disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who, quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, from national bestselling author Ashley Poston.
Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.
When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.
For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.
Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.
Romance is most certainly dead…but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.
